So if you've started looking into cloud computing
lately, you probably know that feeling right
just this Absolute flood of jargon hitting you.
Oh, yeah, I asked Paris Oz BPC C2 It feels less
like technology and more like trying to learn
a completely new language. Honestly, it really
does It's a it's easy to feel pretty overwhelmed
before you even get to what it all means But
you know the thing we really want to unpack today
is that? underneath all that cloud computing,
it's built on just a few pretty powerful, straightforward
ideas. So our mission here is to kind of strip
away that noise, use some clear analogies, and
really build a solid foundation for you. Exactly.
Think of this as the shortcut to getting informed.
Because by the end of this chat, you will just
know what the cloud is, but hopefully you'll
really grasp the core reasons. economic, technical,
why it's become just this massive force in tech
today. Yeah, the why is key. So let's get into
it, maybe starting with the huge shift, the big
change in how IT budgets even work. Okay, where
do we start? The old way. Yeah, got to look back
first. To really get the cloud, you need to remember
the world of on -premises infrastructure. You
know how things worked just a couple of decades
ago? Right. If you wanted to launch, say, a new
website or app, you had months of work ahead
of you, a huge list of things to do before you
even thought about writing cloud. You were basically
a full -time capacity planner. Yeah. And a guesser,
really. You had to predict, like six months out,
how many people would visit your site. And that
guess, it was loaded with risk. Seriously, best
too low, your site crashes, the minute you get
popular, boom, lost sales, lost trust. But guess
too high. Well, you've just spent a ton of money,
capital on servers that are just gonna sit there,
maybe doing nothing 90 % of the time. Yeah, and
that wasn't small change either. We're talking
massive upfront capital expenditure, CapEx, buying
physical servers, networking gear, cooling systems.
Actual physical stuff. Physical assets, exactly.
Then you waited maybe weeks, maybe months for
delivery. Then you needed a special room, a data
center with power, security. The whole setup.
Right. You were spending all your energy on what
we now call, and this phrase is important, undifferentiated
heavy lifting. OK, break that down. It means
all the work -racking servers, stacking them,
replacing drives when they fail, physical security,
managing the network stuff that doesn't actually
make your products special or different from
anyone else's. Like you said, building your own
power plant just to turn the lights on. Pretty
much. It's a huge drain on resources. Terrible
use of time, yeah. It is. And that's precisely
what the cloud wave fixes. So cloud computing,
fundamentally, it's the on -demand delivery of
IT resources. Things like virtual servers, storage,
databases, even specialized AI tools. Exactly.
All delivered over the internet. And here's the
kicker. with pay as you go pricing. Okay, so
that's the core economic shift you mentioned,
moving from that huge upfront capex to operational
expenditure, OPEX. Right. Instead of that big
initial investment, your infrastructure becomes
more like a utility bill. You pay as you go,
only for what you actually use. The electrical
grid analogy, that makes sense. It's perfect,
isn't it? You don't build your own power plant.
You just plug into the wall, pay the utility
like AWS or Google Cloud or Azure only for the
electricity you consume. You don't worry about
how they make the power. You just use it. You
just use it. And because these big providers
run these enormous global networks of secure
data centers, when you use a cloud service, you're
basically renting A tiny slice. A tiny but crucially,
logically isolated slice. Yes, very important.
Logically isolated. But it means even a tiny
startup gets access to the kind of power and
scale that used to be only for massive corporations.
That's huge. It really is. And that idea of renting
is slow, so it leads us right into those service
models. The menu, if you will. This is where
IAS, PIAS, and SOS come in. Different levels
of management. Right, the infamous acronyms.
And to make sense of who manages what you, versus
the provider, we need the pizza analogy, don't
we? The pizza analogy is classic for a reason.
Let's start with IAS Dryas. Infrastructure as
a service. IAS gives you the basic building blocks.
Think compute power, virtual servers networking,
raw storage. But you, the customer, you manage
the operating system, the runtime, your applications,
your data. Everything on top. So in pizza terms,
this is the take and bake option. Exactly. The
pizza place gives you the kitchen, the oven,
the dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, all the raw
ingredients. You assemble it. You bake it. You
decide exactly how it's done. Maximum control.
Maximum control. Key examples here are things
like Amazon EC2. Those are the virtual servers.
And Amazon S3 for object storage, the fundamentals.
Got it. So moving up a level. Moving up in abstraction.
Yeah. We get to pick an S platform as a service.
OK. Here, you, the user, you only really worry
about your application code and your data. Deploying
it, managing it. Ah, so this is like ordering
pizza for delivery. Perfect analogy. You don't
care about the kitchen, the oven, making the
dough. A ready to eat pizza just shows up at
your door. The cloud provider handles all the
stuff underneath my app. The OS, patching, servers,
storage. All of it. They manage the platform.
Think about services like... AWS Elastic Beanstalk,
which automatically handles capacity and load
balancing, or Amazon RDS for managed databases.
Oh, RDS is huge, right? Not having to manage
database patching and backups yourself? Massive
time saver for developers. Yeah. Let's them focus
purely on the application, not database administration.
OK, that sounds way easier. But what's the catch?
If they manage the OS and runtime, does that
mean I lose control if my app needs something
really specific? like a custom OS setting or
something. Ah, that's the core trade -off right
there. You trade some of that fine -grain control
for speed and convenience. Right. If you absolutely
need deep OS access or very specific network
configurations, you probably need IS. But if
speed and easier maintenance are the priority,
paid us is often the better choice. It really
depends on the application. Makes sense. OK,
and the last one, SaaS. SAAS, software as a service.
This is the simplest one, really. It's a finished
product, completely run and managed by the provider.
So the pizza analogy here is just dining out
at the restaurant. Exactly. You show up, order,
eat. The restaurant handles everything, cooking,
serving, cleaning up. You just use the software,
usually through your web browser. So things like
Gmail, Salesforce, Dropbox, Netflix, even Amazon's
own work mail. All SAAS. Things you use every
day without thinking much about the infrastructure
behind them. Right. And understanding these three
models, IS, PAS, SAS, is absolutely critical
because it feeds directly into the shared responsibility
model. Ah, yes. That's key for security, isn't
it? Knowing exactly what the provider is responsible
for. Like the physical security of their data
centers? And what you are responsible for. Oh.
Which could be anything from patching the OS
in IS. all the way up to just managing who has
access to the SaaS application, knowing that
dividing line is crucial. Definitely. Okay, so
we know the service types, but where does this
cloud actually live? Let's talk deployment models.
Good question. Most of what people mean when
they just say the cloud is the public cloud.
Right. Owned and run by a third party like AWS,
Google, Azure. Exactly. Services delivered over
the public internet, and it's a multi -tenant
architecture. Okay, multi -tenant might sound
a bit... Scary to some people. Does that mean
my stuff is mixed in with others? It's a fair
concern, but no, not really. While you are sharing
the underlying physical hardware of the building,
basically your data and applications are kept
separate and secure through logical isolation.
Ah, so the analogy is like living in a big, secure
apartment building. That's a great way to put
it. You share the foundation, maybe the security
guards downstairs, but you have your own private
apartment with your own locks. That locked apartment,
that's your VPC. Your virtual private cloud.
Okay, explain that bit. Right. The VPC is fundamental.
It's how you carve out your own private, isolated
section of the provider's network. Inside your
VPC, you control your own IP addresses, subnets,
route tables, firewalls. It's your virtual network
boundary. Super important for security. Got it.
So that's public cloud. What's the opposite?
It'll be a private cloud, or what we used to
just call on -premises infrastructure. Running
your own data center, basically. Exactly. Operated
purely for one single organization. You get maximum
control, sure. And sometimes regulations require
it. But you completely lose those huge economies
of scale, the agility. You're back to owning
the whole house again. Total control, but also
total responsibility for fixing the roof and
mowing the lawn. You got it, all the costs and
maintenance fall on you. Okay, so public, private,
is there something in between? There is, and
it's very common, especially for larger companies,
the hybrid cloud. Hybrid, makes sense, a mix.
A mix, yeah. Signing a private cloud or your
on -prem setup with one or more public cloud
services, the key is having tools that let data
and applications move between them somewhat easily.
Why would you do that? Lots of reasons. Maybe
disaster recovery, keeping backups in the public
cloud. Or maybe to handle temporary spikes in
traffic. You can burst out to the public cloud
for extra capacity just when you need it without
buying permanent servers for that peak. Ah, OK.
Like owning your house but renting a storage
unit for the holiday decorations you only need
once a year. Perfect. Exactly like that. It gives
you flexibility. Cool. Okay, so we've covered
the what and the where. Now let's really nail
the why. The six big advantages that drive cloud
adoption. Yeah, these six points from AWS really
summarize the business case, the revolution.
First, and we've touched on this, trading capital
expense for variable expense. CapEx for OPEX.
Pay as you go. Freeze up cash. Hugely important.
Second, you benefit from massive economies of
scale. Because providers like AWS buy hardware
in such incredible volumes. The Costco effect.
The Costco effect. It means lower prices for
everyone. Prices that no single company could
ever achieve buying servers on their own. Makes
sense. Third. Third, stop guessing capacity.
Remember that nightmare? Oh, yeah. Eliminated
by elasticity. You can get exactly the capacity
you need when you need it. Scale up in minutes,
scale down in minutes, traffic triples for an
hour. Fine, your capacity triples for that hour,
then shinks back. Automatically. That's incredibly
powerful. Okay, fourth advantage. Fourth, increase
speed and agility. This is huge for developers.
Need a new server, a database, a machine learning
environment. You can get it in minutes, not weeks
or months. So experimenting becomes cheaper and
faster. Massively cheaper and faster. Yeah. And
this speed combined with elasticity leads to
something really profound. The democratization
of advanced technology. What do you mean by that?
It means things that used to be incredibly expensive
and complex, like massive clusters of GPUs for
AI training, are now accessible to almost anyone,
almost instantly. You can rent supercomputing
power for like five minutes, run your job and
turn it off, pay pennies. That ability to just
try things with cutting edge hardware, that's
transformed innovation in the last decade. Yeah,
I can see that changes everything. Okay, fifth
advantage. Fifth, stop spending money on that
undifferentiated heavy lifting. We talked about
that. Let your smart engineers focus on building
your actual product, the thing that makes you
money, not racking servers. Focus on what matters
to the business. Makes sense. And the last one,
sixth. Sixth, go global in minutes. Seriously,
you want to launch your app for users in Europe
and Asia. You can deploy it in AWS regions around
the world with a few clicks. Reduce latency,
give everyone a better experience. Doing that
the old way. Months of work, millions of dollars,
now. Minutes. Wow, okay, that's... That's a compelling
list. Yeah. Economics, scale, elasticity, speed,
focus, global reach. A combination that's pretty
much unstoppable, really. All right, let's tie
this all together. Let's use that startup example
you mentioned, Photoverse, the photo sharing
app. OK, great idea. So Photoverse, old way,
they'd need, what, tens, hundreds of thousands
in seed funding just for hard work. Easily. Months
setting it up, and then that constant fear, crash
if you succeed, stuck with useless gear if you
flop, high risk. Very high risk. Now, the AWS
way, the cloud way, it's total different. Okay,
they launch a few virtual servers, Amazon EC2
instances, that's IAS, to run their web application
code. Simple. For storing potentially billions
of user photos, they use an object storage service,
like Amazon S3. Also, IAS. Super durable, incredibly
cheap. per gigabyte. And the database. Yeah.
They don't want to manage that themselves, right?
Definitely not. So they use a managed database
service like Amazon RDS. That's Pay S. AWS handles
the backups, the patching, the headaches. They
just use the database. Nice. And what about handling
unexpected traffic spikes, like if a photo goes
viral? Ah, elasticity comes to the rescue. They
set up auto -scaling, it automatically watches
the traffic, adds more EC2 servers when needed,
remove them when things quiet down. So the capacity
problem is just handled? Handled. Automatically
and elastically. Okay, so let's sum up the result
for Photoverse using the cloud. Zero dollars
in upfront hardware costs. Zero. 100 % of their
team's effort goes into building the app, not
the infrastructure. They get instant elasticity,
much lower business risk, and they can scale
globally basically overnight if needed. That
really paints the picture. It's just a fundamentally
different, more agile way to build and run technology.
It absolutely is. So maybe we can leave folks
with this thought to chew on. If companies don't
need that massive upfront capex anymore, and
if they can instantly access the world's most
powerful specialized hardware affordably, what
does that really do to the barriers for innovation,
for competition? Yeah, what major roadblocks
for developers, for entrepreneurs have just been
vaporized by this shift? Exactly. What becomes
possible now that wasn't before? That's a powerful
question. And maybe for you listening, think
about the sauce apps you use constantly streaming
documents, whatever. Just try to picture the
incredible infrastructure layer underneath managed
by the provider and think about that shared responsibility
line. Where does their job end and yours begin?
It's a useful exercise. Well, thanks for joining
us as we've tried to unpack some of these cloud
fundamentals today. Yeah, I hope this was helpful.
We'll catch you next time.